Gary are you okay, are you okay Gary?
August 25, 2017 9:26 PM   Subscribe

Is Elon Musk's pet snail okay? Gary is a snail who lives in a pineapple, balanced precariously on a wall overlooking a deep trench. He is trapped there, waiting for the day when he is forced to race against a giant machine.
posted by Literaryhero (20 comments total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
C. aspersum max out at 0.029 mph
Which is... wow. 100x faster than the most powerful TBM, Bertha. I wasn't expecting that.
posted by WaylandSmith at 10:19 PM on August 25, 2017


The whole internet loves Gary, a lovely snail that races tunnel boring machines! *5 seconds later* We regret to inform you the snail wrote a manifesto about how vertebrates are evolutionarily unsuited to race tunnel boring machines
posted by ejs at 10:54 PM on August 25, 2017 [36 favorites]


Carnivorous snail-eating snails are a thing? That's kind of awesome.
posted by BS Artisan at 11:05 PM on August 25, 2017


Gary is a snail who lives in a pineapple, balanced precariously on a wall overlooking a deep trench. He is trapped there, waiting for the day when he is forced to race against a giant machine.

Reality as we know it is now a late-1990s Flaming Lips song.
posted by roger ackroyd at 11:11 PM on August 25, 2017 [23 favorites]


Gary!

Gary!

Are you out there? Can you hear me?

...

What's that? Gary? Are you trying to speak to me?

...

What are you saying?

...

God, I can only imagine how annoying that guy is... At least he can afford to give you premium snail food and hire a snail-sitter when he goes to space or Palo Alto or whatever.

....

Gary are you OK?

I hope you're OK after that Boring company race. With a name like Boring what does that company actually plan to succeed at?

...

All I'm saying Gary is that you're an awesome snail with an awesome personality and you can't let people like Elon Musk tell you that you aren't.

Fuck that noise. I believe in you Gary.
posted by bendy at 11:11 PM on August 25, 2017 [4 favorites]


Okay but now I need to know where I can find that pineapple terrarium because at first I thought it was a joke but no! If someone adds a yellow sponge, my inner child will be very, very happy.
posted by paisley sheep at 12:43 AM on August 26, 2017 [1 favorite]


Seriously. If Gary IS a pulmonate, that makes them hermaphroditic. What if Gary doesn't identify as Gary? I mean, really people, I finally think I can rely on MeFis to understand this sort of thing, then you all go and let me down. Seriously. For shame...
posted by Samizdata at 1:47 AM on August 26, 2017 [2 favorites]


I like the idea that Elon Musk basically models his life on SpongeBob.
posted by Segundus at 4:07 AM on August 26, 2017 [3 favorites]


Can you imagine working in PR for The Boring Company and explaining to your boss,

"Sir I am worried, gizmodo have started harassing us over the snail joke."
posted by adventureloop at 4:53 AM on August 26, 2017 [5 favorites]


@elonmusk When you say 'Hanging with your chum, Gary on Sunday', do you intend to take Gary fishing and use him as bait? Are you replacing Gary with a different mollusk? Did Gary fail to meet his quarterly goals? Did investor sentiment drop regarding Gary?
posted by Nanukthedog at 5:07 AM on August 26, 2017 [2 favorites]


> "Sir I am worried, gizmodo have started harassing us over the snail joke."

Because Gizmodo gave them a pass for calling themselves The Boring Company?
posted by ardgedee at 6:23 AM on August 26, 2017


This is probably the only thing I have in common with Elon Musk. I have working snails in my laboratory; I use their gut enzymes to digest things. So I often watch them tool around their tank, and I know they are intelligent air-breathing quickly-moving hermaphroditic cannibals. Watch your back, Elon.
posted by acrasis at 6:47 AM on August 26, 2017 [7 favorites]


Elon Musk's crimes are great...
posted by Reverend John at 7:57 AM on August 26, 2017 [3 favorites]


Guys, what if reality as I know it is just a holding tank, designed to keep me alive until the day when transdimensional beings can pit me in an ironic race against their extremely slow spacetime-tunneling machine? I'm trying to figure out the appropriate emotional response.
posted by dephlogisticated at 9:27 AM on August 26, 2017 [2 favorites]


How do you have a pet named Gary, and not create a habitat for it designed to look like Vault 108?
posted by xedrik at 9:31 AM on August 26, 2017


You seriously want to interview a snail? "Kate, he doesn't even really talk to us," indeed. What did she expect, Elon Musk to put on a snail voice and start talking about how Gary eats leaves all day?
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:40 AM on August 26, 2017


doesn't seem like a fair race if the snail doesn't also have to bore a tunnel
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 12:47 PM on August 26, 2017


This thread needs a link to William Jobin's earlier work on snail power.
posted by nonane at 3:24 PM on August 26, 2017 [1 favorite]


You seriously want to interview a snail? "Kate, he doesn't even really talk to us," indeed. What did she expect, Elon Musk to put on a snail voice and start talking about how Gary eats leaves all day?

Yes. I, too, want to interview snails called Gary: this woman is very much a sensible human being for wanting the same - who knows what secrets it can reveal about the soil. And if in her interview Elon Musk put on a small voice and pretended to be Gary then she would have done the world a great good.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 6:31 PM on August 26, 2017 [3 favorites]


Snails are underrated as pets. So much fun to watch and such interesting lifecycles.

It started with an apple snail infestation in my crayfish tank (I like weird pets). Instead of trying to remove the snails I turned the tank into a snail tank. Hundreds of Mason jars later I had a lot of fun selective breeding apple snails. I needed to downsize, so I started breeding assasin snails (hello Whelk) for the fresh water tank trade, but stopped when I awoke to the dangers of introducing species to NorCal.

Currently I keep a few zebra and tiger nerite snails in freshwater community tanks. Soon I will move them to a 'tidal' tank and start to slowly salt the water until they breed.

On the terrestrial front I keep a few banana slugs, a few shelled slugs I found near Berkeley, and I recently traded a few local reticulated tail droppers (other people also like weird pets).

I hope all my snails and slugs are fluke free, one of my ant colonies (did I say I like weird pets?) is a picky eater that has rejected almost every protein, but loves to eat foot mucus and snail eggs.

If you see a snail or slug in the garden try to identify it before you kill it. Many species are decomposers and actually good for your plants, and in many places local species are endangered and you could help them out by encouraging the right micro climate and providing estivation/hibernation sites.
posted by Dr. Curare at 1:38 AM on August 28, 2017 [3 favorites]


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